To Boylston Adams Beal
9 Av de l’Observatoire
Paris. June 7, 1920
Your letter was awaiting me here, where I have just returned from Italy, and where I expect to spend the summer. It makes me feel, in one way, how much I am cut off from what used to be our common circle; you tell me things, and imply others, that I had no notion of. That I mentioned Herbert in writing to you was a pure accident as I had heard nothing of his breaking down or disappearing from the world—I suppose at Pawtucket or whatever the name of the place is where his wife’s family spent the summer—nor did I know that Elsie’s mother was dead. I am very sorry to hear it; especially about Herbert, since that is the less inevitable misfortune. I have always felt that he was a sacrifice offered on the altar of Bostonian superstition about work—a sort of Isaac that Abraham was ordered to slay, and no opportune angel or sheep came in at the last moment to save him. If he had had a little more courage, he might have become one of those disaffected and homeless Americans of whom I see so much in these parts: and perhaps that, too, would not have been satisfactory. What a curious tragedy Puritanism is!
When you come to Europe again I hope you will not stay in England, as I hardly expect to return there for a year or more; when it gets too cold here (we can get no coal and very little wood) I shall probably go to Spain (where I haven’t been since before the war) or to Italy, where I had a very pleasant and not wholly idle winter this year. The routine of life for me is everywhere much the same, but I like to drink in congenial sights and sounds, and to haunt congenial places; and Rome is a most congenial place to me in every way.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA